Posts

This
article was originally published in the Penn Biomed Postdoctoral Council Newsletter (Spring 2015).
Historically, the NIH has received straightforward bipartisan
support; in particular, the doubling of the NIH budget from FY98-03 led to a
rapid growth in university based research. Unfortunately, ever since 2003,
inflation has been slowly eating away at the doubling effort (Figure 1). There
seems little hope for recovery other than the brief restoration in 2009 by the
American Recovery and Reinvestment Act (ARRA). Making matters worse, Congress now
has an abysmal record of moving policy through as bipartisan fighting dominates
the Hill. Currently, support directed to the NIH is a mere 0.79% of
federal discretionary spending. The bulk of this funding goes directly to
extramural research, providing salaries for over 300,000 scientists across 2500
universities. As the majority of
biomedical researchers rely on government funding, it behooves these unique
constitue…

Biology and preclinical medicine rely heavily upon research
in animal models such as rodents, dogs, and chimps. But how translatable are
the findings from these animal models to humans? And what alternative systems
are being developed to provide more applicable results while reducing the number
of research animals?

Last Thursday, PSPG invited Dr. Sarah Cavanaugh from the
Physicians Committee for Responsible Medicine to discuss these issues. In her
talk entitled, “Homo sapiens: the ideal animal model,” she emphasized that we
are not particularly good at translating results from animal models into human
patients. Data from the FDA says that 90% of drugs that perform well in animal
studies fail when tested in clinical trials.
It may seem obvious, but it is important
to point out that the biology of mice is not identical to human biology.
Scientific publications have demonstrated important dissimilarities in regards
to the pathology of inflammation,
diabetes,
cancer, Alzheimer’s,
and he…